This
being election season, real issues are as scarce as hen’s dentures. Sound bites
degrade to dum-dum bullets: “I’ll create jobs,” “I’ll fight crime.” Meanwhile,
the manifest wounds lie open. Society has fallen on barbed wire; every small
movement causes another cut. And the issue that cuts most deeply on the
domestic front — economic inequality — stays within the fence, barely
mentioned.
           The abstract point has plenty of
numbers behind it, too.
           The local Metropolitan Forum brought
this home in 1996 with a report on The
Health of Monroe County’s Suburbs: Stagnation in the Inner Ring. (Find it
at www.rit.edu/~metforum/redbook.html.) The report covered not just the towns
but also the city of Rochester. It summarized economic inequalities between the
city, inner-ring suburbs like Irondequoit and Greece, and outer ring ‘burbs
like Pittsford and Mendon. And the report hasn’t been superseded.
           Tony Favro, an assistant to
Rochester Mayor Bill Johnson who’s studying metro problems and solutions, calls
the report “the last authoritative study” on the subject. Favro adds that City
Hall has plans to “update [the report] and go beyond it.” But because this task
isn’t quick and easy, it will have to wait. “It really does take time and some
digging” to make sense of the data, Favro says. “Things aren’t reported in a
way that would be easiest to use.”
           Now that reams of data from US
Census 2000 are out, however, it’s possible to make some selective comparisons
of local communities.
When you put the older and
newer data side-by-side, you find patterns that are changing for the worse, if
anything.
           Using 1995 data from the census and
local sources, the Metropolitan Forum report started with a look at “assessed
value per capita,” determined by dividing the total value of taxable property
and utilities in a municipality by the number of residents there. (Household
wealth tends to vary directly with the value of homes and other properties —
but there are exceptions, as with working farmers or homeowners with low or
fixed incomes.) The report said the city had an assessed value per capita of
$25,623. For Greece, the figure was $38,694; Irondequoit, with similar
demographics, was at $37,807. The southeastern suburbs stood in contrast to the
rest of the county. Pittsford had $68,687 of value per capita, and Mendon
topped the scale with $70,149 per capita.
           Today, things look much the same —
only more so, in a manner of speaking.
           According to figures assembled early
this year by the Monroe County Legislature, the city of Rochester’s taxable
assessed valuation now totals $4,719,335,933. (City assessments are given at
full value, 100 percent, as are the other assessments used here, except
Pittsford’s, which is slightly below full value.) Given the city’s population
of 219,773, that works out to $21,474 per capita.
           For the town of Greece, using the
same set of data, per capita valuation works out to $40,312. Irondequoit, at
$37,453 per capita, is in pretty much the same boat. And again, the southeast
stands out. The town and village of Pittsford (combined) come in at $74,297 per
capita. For Mendon, including the village of Honeoye Falls, the figure is
$69,808.
           All municipalities within the county
saw increases in their total assessed valuations between 1977 and 1995, as the
Metropolitan Forum report showed. But there were substantial divergences. At
the bottom was the city, with a growth rate over those years of 0.03 percent,
essentially zero. Gates and East Rochester were in the teens, while Greece had
rate just under 37 percent. Mendon and Perinton were practically tied at the
top, both with over 130 percent.
           You can’t call the plays without
reading the population scorecard, too.
           Between 1990 and 2000, Monroe
County’s population increased by 3 percent — small indeed. The city of
Rochester’s population, though, went down 4.6 percent (oddly, about the same
drop as in the village of Pittsford).
Greece and Irondequoit sort of canceled each other out: Greece went up 2.4
percent, and Irondequoit went down by the same percentage. But the town of
Pittsford grew by more than 11 percent, while Mendon grew by more than 22
percent.
           Looking over these figures, you see
a few things. The rich got richer, in terms of the value of real property and
its multiplier effect on a community’s wealth. Pittsford and Mendon, for
example, kept the same per capita valuations while significantly increasing
their head counts, which means gobs more wealth within their borders. Greece,
though, gained only a little in total community wealth, through a slight
increase in population and an equally slight increase in per capita valuation.
And Irondequoit, which lost some capitas,
managed to stay level in total valuation.
           Then there’s poor Rochester.
Continuing a longtime trend, the city’s population declined significantly —
the drop of 4.6 percent translates into 10,583 fewer people. But the city lost
proportionately more in total valuation: down by around 16 percent in just 10
years.
Rochester-area
conversation often turns to inequities in local tax rates. And the
figures show the common wisdom isn’t far from the mark: City taxpayers do get a
raw deal, comparatively.
           Data from the state Office of Real
Property Services show that local “overall property tax rates,” which factor in
different rates for homesteads versus non-homesteads, are all over the map. In
fiscal 2001, for example, the town of Mendon’s overall rate was a bit under $28
per thousand dollars of assessed value. In Irondequoit, the rate ranged between
$33 to $35 per thousand. Pittsford came in at $26 to $32. The city of
Rochester’s rate was $37.11. (The total on your tax bill is, of course, the
rate times your property’s assessed value. Most city properties cost much less
than comparable ones in the ‘burbs, which means a lower tax bill in absolute
terms — but not in relation to property value.)
           The latest figures from the Greater
Rochester Association of Realtors, as reported by Gannett, show that through
most of calendar 2001, the median price for a city home was $49,900. The median price of a suburban home during the
same period was $112,500; in Pittsford, the figure was $219,500, while in
Mendon it was $239,000. These figures are up-to-the-minute but not
comprehensive, since they reflect only the information gathered by the
association.
           But the figures do show the
trajectories quite clearly. For example, in 1990, according to US census
figures, the median home price in the town of Pittsford was $162,000. Meanwhile
in the city, as the city’s Rochester 2010 plan puts it, “the median home value dropped from $67,344 in 1960 to $57,500 in
1998.” And so another gap yawns wider.
The national
housing boom — and a possible bust to follow, if investment dollars
flow back to a healthier Wall Street — position the price/tax figures on
shaky ground. But the pattern of inequality persists through the ups and downs.
           What about the money that flows back
from the proverbial Taxman to the citizens, in the form of public services,
capital investment, and so forth? Doesn’t that iron out the inequalities?
           Not exactly.
           Two broad trends are worth attention
here — and since they’ve been well documented in recent news coverage, they
don’t require detailed comment.
           First, there’s the current (and soon
to be annualized) financial crisis in New York State’s big urban school
districts, including Rochester’s; the Pataki administration and urban school
advocates are now in court to see if the state school aid formula will be
adjusted to help the ailing “Big Five” districts. Second, proposed cuts to the
Monroe County budget, due to be voted on in early November, are weighted
against services for the poor, the vast bulk of whom live in the city; the cuts
will therefore mean fewer county tax dollars flowing into the city — even if
the county’s sales-tax sharing formula is tweaked when it comes up for review
next year.
           It’s not just dollar figures and
percentages that tell the story, however. Look at where new residences are
being built. There’s plenty of obvious new-home construction in suburban areas,
while in the city, though it too has plenty of vacant land, new construction is
relatively rare. (“In 1996,” say Rochester
2010, “the city ranked fifth, behind the towns of Webster, Greece, Perinton
and Penfield, in the number of building permits issued for new single-family
home construction.”)
           But there are other items on the
landscape that point to inequalities between the city and stagnating inner-ring
suburbs on one hand, and the growing outer-ring suburbs on the other.
           The town of Greece, for example,
recently opened a fancy new town hall complex to replace smaller quarters. And
the town of Webster recently opened a new recreation center with up-to-date attractions.
Such buildings stand in contrast to similar facilities within the city limits.
The city’s recreation centers, for example, have drawn criticism for not being
able to “compete” with suburban counterparts. Bottom line: The municipalities
that have the cash — in government receipts and in the pockets of residents
— can create new facilities and services; those without the cash make do with
less.
           Not that attention to the problem is
wholly lacking.
           Monroe County Legislator Jay Ricci,
an Irondequoit Democrat, has been focusing on the way sales-tax revenue and
other local funds have been shared. “It’s the law of diminishing returns as
it’s set up now,” he says. Because the sales-tax formula is based on a town’s
assessed valuation as well as its population, he says, the outer ring gets more
and the inner ring gets proportionately less. “It’s a downward spiral,” he
says.
           There is a rationale behind this
disparity, says Ricci, adding he doesn’t buy it. The “conventional argument,”
he says, is that high-income suburbanites “spend more of their discretionary
income on things covered by the sales tax.” So in conventional terms, the town
whose citizens put a lot into the
kitty deserves a bigger share from the kitty. (It’s something like George W. Bush’s belief that “it’s your money”
and that government’s duty is merely to “give it back.”)
Any local
initiatives on this front, though, will have to contend with what higher levels of
government do.
           Ricci predicts that right after the
November 5 election, we’ll see a “big hole” open up in the state budget — a
hole that will precipitously “roll downhill.”
           Moreover, he says, there’s a bigger
hole somewhere in the pipeline between New Yorkers and the feds. “We get back
50 cents of every dollar we send to Washington,” he says. Indeed, this has been
a durable feature of state-federal relations for many years, as tracked by
former US Senator Daniel P. Moynihan.
           Last December, the Business Council
of New York State determined that in fiscal 2000, “New York State taxpayers
sent the federal government some $47 billion more in taxes than the state
received in federal spending.” This was based on a total outflow to Washington
of $166 billion, and an inflow to the state of $119 billion. Moreover, the
Council said, the 2000 deficit was “the largest ever.” It’s the same old tune:
a formula that’s almost guaranteed to place New York’s poor or stagnating
communities at a disadvantage, given the dominant priorities and public
spending patterns.
           What way forward from here?
           Metropolitan Forum member John
Klofas suggests the approach taken in Minneapolis. There, he says, a certain
portion of new tax revenues goes into a fund that supports the disadvantaged
parts of the metro area.
           Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state
senator, law professor, and writer on metro issues, described this system in
the Sacramento Bee earlier this year.
He told how, way back in 1971, Minnesota passed a “Fiscal Disparities” act to
address the Rust Belt decline afflicting the state’s cities. The act, said
Orfield, allowed the sharing of commercial property taxes to benefit the
cities, not only to promote development more evenly, but also to reduce
destructive competition between urban areas.
           Orfield credited the act with
helping Minneapolis and St. Paul really behave as Twin Cities, working together
on the revenue side and — not incidentally — reducing sprawl in the
process.
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2002.
